Weed on wheels: Pot delivery services are on a roll

This story comes from the Los Angeles Times, which as far as I know is not a satire site:

Brian Reichle couldn’t have gotten a pepperoni pizza much faster.

Needing to replenish his stash of pot one recent afternoon, the Burbank resident dialed Speed Weed. Within the hour, a driver arrived with a white paper bag carrying a gram of cannabis, 10 joints and a handful of pot-infused candies and cookies.

“They come to my house, and they’re in and out,” said Reichle, 39, a comedian who spends about $100 a week on medical marijuana. “I shouldn’t have to go to a store.”

Once a small, word-of-mouth phenomenon, mobile marijuana businesses now number in the hundreds across Southern California. Nationwide, pot delivery services have nearly tripled in three years, from 877 to 2,617, according to Weedmaps, a Yelp-like online directory for pot businesses.

“I still believe 75% of marijuana patients don’t know delivery is a thing,” said Speed Weed owner A.J. Gentile, 42, a Bronx native who also works as a voice-over actor. “It’s safer to engage this way. You don’t have to go to a sketchy dispensary. That’s why we get so many female customers.”

The proliferation of delivery services is fueled in part by city efforts to reduce the number of dispensaries. About 200 have closed in Los Angeles since voters approved Proposition D last year, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office said.

Under the measure, dispensaries and their landlords can be prosecuted if the shops aren’t properly registered or if they fail to operate a legal distance from public parks, schools, child-care centers and other facilities. As a result, the owners of closed stores sitting on piles of unsold inventory figure they have little choice but to start a delivery service.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 19th, 2014 at 5:27 pm and is filed under california reaming, circus of life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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7 Responses to Weed on wheels: Pot delivery services are on a roll

Oklahomans can’t buy alcohol on Sunday. We can’t buy alcohol after 9PM. We can’t buy alcohol except at alcohol-only stores (which don’t allow “party goods,” like, say, a corkscrew). We can’t buy cold beer. At grocers, there is weak beer available cold, for the desperate and the unsuspecting out-of-staters. For all of this, you must go to the stores, show your ID, and you sure as heaven better be sober when you get there.

I can see a great market for deliveries of cold regular beer (to say the least). After all, we don’t want those alcohol-consumers out driving around thirsty, right? Home delivery of booze, for the ecology and for the childrens!

No, no, we can’t have that. For legal alcohol. But pot — still technically a felony violation if you don’t pay that prohibitive Fed sales tax, like, $10,000 an ounce or something, and still a Schedule 1 drug like heroin (as far as I know) — home delivery, dude!

Went to college in Wisconsin. Learned to drink beer there. The town straddled the Illinois border. Yes, that town. Wisc. had drinking age 18 and Ill. had drinking age 21. Ill. also had the better greasy-pizza joint, so there was lots of under-age drinking there. My frat brothers insisted I could not keep drinking Dr Pepper.

Does give one a certain perspective when you can stand with one foot in one jurisdiction and one foot in another and whether you’re legal or not may depend on which hand the beer is in…

Met the Mrs at college in Wisconsin, though, so it wasn’t a total loss.

You couldn’t get us back in Wisconsin for all the money in the lottery.